Love her or hate her (and my opinions are mixed), I must confess, JK Rowling was a huge influence on why I didn’t become a regular author. No shade on people who get what they paid for, but the young reader crowd is just so gimmicky, and not in a good way, and you see that with a lot of works like Percy Jackson and Twilight (but also predominantly with Rowling’s work). How do you compete in such a no-rules game?
So then let’s talk about one of the cores of the issue. People often have an epiphany when divulging into Harry Potter, and they think “huh, what’s the deal with this if that thing is how it is”. While noting that conflicts in literary analysis don’t always reflect something that doesn’t add up and that it could be a hiccup in details/semantics, the questions themselves don’t go away. And there’s nothing that matches the amount of those having to do with Harry Potter. What example of which strikes you as the most overlooked?
If Rowling herself ever notices that I’m bringing this up, let it be known I do think of her work as a reskinned Brothers Grimm in the universe of The Worst Witch and that I’m collaborating with another author (Samantha Rinne) whose work I would argue deserves Rowling’s prestige if Rowling’s work deserves it. Thanks (and here is where I run for the hills).
While I think that can be explained away with the idea that the magic is so OP they don’t actually need to know science. To use the Rowlings own tidbit as an example, why bother with toilets when you can simply magic away your shit.
And that also leads to what IMO is the biggest plot point nobody really thinks about. That there’s a secret society of magic users who almost exclusively use magic, and the “muggle” society has no idea of its existence.
Think about all the things we’ve discovered. Electromagnetism is pretty much magic, we figured that out. Atoms are pretty much magic, not only did we figure out atoms we figured out what atoms consist of. Einstein predicted black holes, something so out there that even Einstein doubted his prediction, we later discovered and modeled it. We can literally come up with absolutely insane ideas and then come up with ways to prove or disprove those ideas. There’s no chance we wouldn’t figure out the existence of magic and a secret society if we saw glimpses of something that makes us go “hmm, that’s interesting”.
You could argue that they use magic to hide magic from us, but they’d have to know about what we are doing to make sure we don’t accidentally stumble into discovering magic. But Arthur Weasley makes it pretty clear wizards don’t understand how our world works. They don’t know what we’re doing so their secret society is literally at the mercy of us not just noticing it.
So the secret of society pretty much exists on the premise that we’re too stupid to figure out Magic, but smart enough to create the society we have.
Not defending anything in particular. But at least in the books themselves it is explicit that magic is not a thing to figure out. You’re either born capable of accessing magic or you aren’t. A muggle can’t reason their way into acquiring magic. The book’s entire universe is based on the divide between those forced to exist within the confines of natural laws (muggles) and those capable of bending and breaking said rules to basically achieve whatever (wizards).
I’m fine with that. I’m not saying we should be able to “aquire” magic. I’m saying we’re somehow incapable of even acknowledging its existence. If muggles can’t perceive magic then what’s the point of keeping it a secret.
Obviously that’s not true because not only could Dursleys see magic but it was used on them, thus magic is observable and muggles would be trying to harness it because they wouldn’t know they can’t.
So it also somewhat makes sense why they’d have a secret society. But to keep it a secret you need know what the muggles are up to so they wouldn’t discover your secret. You need something like an intelligence agency to keep track of muggles and intervene if they get close to the secret.
But you don’t know how the muggle world works, so you don’t know what the muggles are doing which means you can’t intervene if they start to discover magic. If you can’t prevent them from discovering magic why haven’t they discovered magic?